BCR Questions

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Serving the greedy, not the needy

Wading through financial reports of BC's two main political parties leads me to the conclusion that BC Liberals have lost interest in honest and ethical government and are now focused on lining the pockets of friends and insiders.

Private power producers, the oil and gas industry, mining companies, real estate developers and others know that to do business in this province, they must pay the piper and the piper looks like a BC Liberal fundraiser.

Large enterprises have long been used to making significant facilitation payments to achieve business objectives. Now, I have credible reports that small businesses trying to do business with the province are discovering that kickbacks and political contributions are requisites for a relationship.

British Columbia Liberals have created a system where illicit payments by businesses and individuals are part of the day to day culture of government. Leaders of the ruling party lost interest in serving the needy; instead they aim to serve the greedy.

With apologies to the memory of Abraham Lincoln, I offer an updated version of his most famous speech:

Seven score and one years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new province, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great economic war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure if affluence of a few forces deficiency upon the many and contrived associations of persons with loyalty to no place and nobody exercise power and influence over peoples that inhabit these lands.

The brave pioneers who struggled here before us, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. It is rather for us to be dedicated to the task remaining before us -- that from these honoured predecessors we take increased devotion to the lands to which they gave devotion -- that we here highly resolve that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom and equal opportunity -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this province.

3 comments:

Some of the most egregious pillaging of the public weal, the most galling of BC Liberal perfidy and most blatant tampering of public documents will happen as this government approaches it own execution, looking more and certain every day. This business is nasty enough while mutual complicity compels culprits to co-operate in all sorts of cover-ups but it may become knee-jerk if the party begins to break up on by-election re-entry. Van Dongen's defection to the Conservatives hints at the kind of honour among thieves we can expect from the next bunch of rats to abandon ship. He took enough dope with him to make any attempt to implicate him with BC Liberal transgression very painful for pursuers. We may yet see more of these creative exit strategies if the bye-bye elections go badly for the government. Panic may spread among the ranks, and panic leads to haste which leads to carelessness which leads to evidence as time runs out to clean it up. We allow ourselves a bit of Schadenfreude from the slow-mo train-wreck inevitability of it all, resigned to the book-keeping nightmare forensics will reveal when this corrupt government finally falls. But that kind of cynicism should be tempered by another feature that attends any regime whose fate has apparently been sealed: an uncooperative and/or disobedient bureaucracy which no longer fears punishment.

The epitome of facelessness, the antithesis of personality cult, if government was an iceberg, the bureaucracy would be the submerged, biggest part. It is as essential for well-laid political exit strategies as it is for the smooth execution of policy. The more BC Liberals look like they're going to get wiped out, the more sensitive bureaucrats will be to attempted frame-ups as rats try to cover their tracks, the bolder the whistleblowers and the more overt partisan retaliation will become. No one in government can be complacent about fixes being in, potentials for things to go sideways being as big as they are right now.

As Scotty as described, professional civil servants who have taken pride in their work, will be more than happy to provide incriminating evidence to try and repair the damage caused by the greedy, incompetent, corrupt BC Liberal government.

I look forward to the day that all hell starts to break loose and the BC Liberal MLA's all get kicked out of office and the accusations fly.

Anonymous....don't hold your breath about honest civil servants and don't forget when the Social Credit got wiped out the the civil servants(appointed by SC) in the Ministry of Forest rewrote TFL agreements during the early stages of the NDP government(of which the NDP politicians knew nothing about). The rewriting of the TFL agreements eliminated manufacturing obligations and as result we now have unfettered raw log export. Don't kid yourself these guys are strictly looking out for number one. Remember Glen Clark's promise to double the number of wood lot licenses, the bureaucrats made sure that didn't happen...not a one.

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